Coventry Review of The Evil

The Evil (1978)

For Sale: Antique House with Unique Portal Leading Straight into Hell

[7/10 · 18 January 2009]

"The Evil" is presumably one of the most prototypic Haunted House movies ever made and the screenplay embraces almost every tiniest clichéd element you expect in a film of this sub genre, from ghostly appearances only one character can see over possessed pet dogs and onto puddles of quicksand in the front garden. I'm rather skeptical towards these haunted mansion movies, because usually they're 90% boredom and false scares, but somehow I always had good feeling about "The Evil" and felt an inexplicable desire to track this fairly obscure late 70's movie down. The good news about "The Evil" is that the plot may be clichéd and unoriginal, at least the film never once suffers from a dull or tedious moment. The production values may look cheap and tacky, but there's always something spectacular or engrossing going on to entertain you. The characters are nitwit stereotypes and yet the players depict them vividly and with great enthusiasm. And so the list of contradictory anticipations goes on, making "The Evil" actually a very worthwhile and underrated gem in its kind. Psychiatrist C.J. Arnold (Richard Crenna) and his devoted wife Caroline purchase a very ancient and isolated mansion with the intention of renovating it into a rehab clinic for some of C.J's toughest drug addict patients. Terrible idea, obviously, since the house contains the most ultimately malignant forces and, during the opening sequences, we already witnessed how these forces viciously killed the caretaker in the incinerator room. Caroline immediately senses the spiritual warnings coming from the builder's restless spirit, but stubborn and overly rational C.J. continues with the renovations together with a handful of friends and patients he recruited to help. When he stupidly removes a sacred cross in the basement, the house promptly locks up all entries and all satanic evil from the pit below becomes unleashed. The disposable supportive characters continue to meet their gruesome and nasty deaths (electrocutions, burned alive, drowned in mud…) until C.J. discovers the house actually had a resident already! No less than Satan himself – played by crazy old Victor Buono and resembling an awful lot like what you would expect God to look like – lives in the pit underneath the place and amuses himself a great deal with terrorizing the new tenants! The script of "The Evil" contains several illogical and excessively campy twists (including the whole 'encounter-with-Satan' finale) but it's all strangely tolerable thanks to the fast pacing and high number of imaginative death scenes. The history of the house and its builder Emilio Vargas, as well as why evil chose to live there exactly, never gets properly clarified and there several more things that don't make the slightest bit of sense, but I guess you have to overlook this sort of things. Director Gus Trikonis maintains an admirably sinister atmosphere throughout the entire movie and some of the set pieces look genuinely macabre. The entrance to the pit, more or less illustrated on the gloomy poster image here on the website, looks and sounds really creepy and the house's auto-lock system of doors and windows is grippingly tense as well. "The Evil" isn't the type of film you check out for its intellectual content or superbly written dialogs, but in case you look for sheer thrills, bloodshed and uncanny ambiance you definitely won't regret a viewing.